The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the profound bond and responsibility of parenthood, suggesting that true understanding comes only through the experience of being a parent.
Philip Roth's quote highlights the wisdom that is bestowed upon a parent through personal experience rather than mere belief. It suggests that the journey of parenthood is a transformative one, where the challenges and joys of raising a child bring about a deeper understanding of life's complexities. The phrase 'someday you'll be a parent' conveys anticipation for an inevitable life stage that will evoke empathy and insight that cannot be taught but must be lived.
In practice
A speaker at a parenting workshop might use this quote to encourage understanding between parents and their children.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population.
I did make a choice when I got away from baseball to be there to get my kids off to college.
My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.
The child in me could not die as it should have died, because according too legends it must find its father again. The old legends knew, perhaps, that in absence the father becomes glorified, deified, eroticized, and this outrage against God the Father has to be atoned for. The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.
A couple of years before he died, I kissed my father goodbye. He said, 'Son, you haven't kissed me since you were a little boy.' It went straight to my heart, and I kissed him whenever I saw him after that, and my sons and I always kiss whenever we meet.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.